Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger is a quirky Australian
coming-of-age story that gives the genre a good name. For while
this mildly stylised first feature from writer-director Cathy
Randall can't compete with the recent Juno in craft or
pizazz, as a comic account of a youthful identity crisis it's
substantially less glib.

Small, spectacled and Jewish, the quietly cheeky Esther
Blueburger (Danielle Catanzariti) is an outcast at her snooty
private school. At home, her nerdy twin brother (Christian Byers)
is developing into a full-blown sociopath, while mum (Essie Davis)
is a control freak obsessed with keeping up appearances as a
gourmet cook.

This supposed ugly duckling takes wing, with the help of new
friend Sunni - played by Keisha Castle-Hughes from Whale
Rider (2002) - who steals the film with her gruff
self-confidence, even if the script is hard-put to account for her
Kiwi accent. Esther finds another kindred spirit in Sunni's
laidback mother, Mary (Toni Collette), who works as a stripper
while dreaming of a career in real estate.

Randall freely adapts the conventions of the modern teen movie
to her own purposes, and the approach suggests children's
television with a touch of the demented: this is a film that
devotes a montage to the making of fairy bread, but also one that
contains the line, "I don't want to be a 14-year-old virgin"